You’ll recall how I’ve been writing for my uni’s studentmag. It’s some full on proper do-gooding, converting everyone on campus to my splendid way of life and raising issues usually neglected by right-on students such as Fairtrade, vegetarianism, feminism, environmentalism… Oh. Right.

Anyway, the new issue’s theme is love and hate. For those of you whose subscription to the magazine has lapsed, here’s my bit complete with soon to be edited off-colour gags:

This being the love and hate issue, and this also being the do-gooding bit of the mag, I’m looking at something that enflames the emotions of both extremes: vegetarianism. Vegetarians are both loved (by themselves) and hated (by everyone else). I say this as a proud and practising vegetarian myself. Believe me when I say the extreme lifestyle choice on which I have embarked is a constant source of moral contentment, slight embarrassment and massive inconvenience.

On the love side, I love knowing I’m not doing harm to animals. No lambs are being chopped, no cows are being steaked, no chickens are being chickened for me and my dinner. No animals are being raised in painfully cramped conditions for my sake, no animals are being electrocuted and killed from me wanting it, no animals are being skinned for my clothes. I am loving that more than just a bit.

Also on the love side, I love living according to my principles. For years I thought it was cruel to hurt and kill animals for food in the way I thought it was cruel to hunt and kill animals for sport or to torture and kill animals for giving the RSPCA something to do. I thought it was cruel but I kept on eating animals because they were full on proper tasty. Now I don’t, and it feels good to be good about it.

But then there’s the hate side of things, and with vegetarianism it’s not insignificant. First, I hate being associated with militant types who think the ‘Meat is Murder’ T-shirt never went out of fashion, who accuse meat eaters of being hypocrites or worse than Hitler, who sharpen tofu into spears and go about the place stabbing anyone within a three-mile radius of KFC. I’m not up for that at all. I’d like more vegetarians in the world and less cruelty to animals but I’m not looking to get judgmental and self-righteous about it. If you want to eat meat, like I did for the first 25 years of my life, then shine on.

Second, I hate having to put up with PETA. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are like that gobby kid in school who wanted attention and didn’t care if he was getting it from a decent grade or from kicking another kid in the chin; as long as people were looking at him he was chuffed. So while they do cracking undercover investigations on life in the slaughterhouse they also indulge in publicity stunts that make them an easy target for anyone looking to make fun of vegetarianism. More worryingly, they tend to neglect the basics of feminism, having largely female supporters get their kit off and showing an annual ‘State of the Union Undress’ where a female supporter strips while running over their successes from the previous 12 months. It’s a baffling campaign to convert Page 3 fans to vegetarianism while leaving women objectified and feminists of both genders furious.

Lastly, I hate the inconvenience of vegetarianism. When you go out the world is your oyster; when I go out the world is my tomato-based pasta dish. Most restaurants show no interest in the millions of vegetarians we have knocking about the country and tend to offer only a veggie burger, veggie lasagne or something with tomatoes, and stuffed mushrooms appears to be the world’s only legal vegetarian starter. Then there’s the problem of explaining how Parmesan cheese isn’t vegetarian (it’s got rennet from a cow’s stomach in it), how alcohol isn’t always vegetarian (it’s sometimes got isinglass from a fish’s swim bladder in it) or how ice cream isn’t always vegetarian (I can’t even be bothered explaining that one). It’s a massive faff best avoided, which is why I now only leave the house when it’s on fire. I just stay in and cook my own animal-friendly food which, happily, brings us back to the love side of things.

I love the taste of tofu, soya milk, lentils, chick peas, Quorn and everything cooked up by the ghost of Linda McCartney. Actually that’s not entirely true. I hate it. I hate it all. Six years into this vegetarianism lark I still dream about bacon and wake up crying. But there we are. Love it or hate it, this is the life I chose.

For more on vegetarianism and animal rights, visit The Vegetarian Society. For more on meat and animal wrongs, visit your local butcher.

As is the case with seemingly everything I do nowadays, my new year’s resolutions received mixed reviews and a couple of death threats, with The New York Times calling them “lazy, uninspired and self-regarding”, the Daily Mail calling them “a bunch of Commies that threaten the traditional family” and Heating and Ventilation News complaining they had “little or nothing to do with either heating or ventilation.”

But criticism doesn’t sting me; instead it inspires me to act, much as Kevin Costner’s movie reviews must do to him. Except they don’t inspire him to act so much as to read out loud and remember not to look at the camera, but you get my point. My point being he’s not a very good actor.

One of my resolutions was to buy a new toothbrush and, on the surface, it seems like a fairly easy thing to tick off my list. Maybe it is if all you do is think of an item you need, go into a shop and buy it and then bring it home and use it. But my life isn’t that simple, my social conscience being the size of six double-decker football pitches and my life being ruined by a sense of duty that borders on a personality disorder. I lie awake at night thinking about the harm my toothbrush is doing to the world, its oil-spawned plastic bringing us ever closer to drowning in the Gore Apocalypse. It cannot go on, and so I find myself in search of the world’s most ethical alternative toothbrush. My options are as varied as they are dull to read about.

The most sustainable choice is probably the wooden toothbrush with pig bristles. There’s no plastic there at all, just degradable and recyclable materials. Much as I like its Flintstonian qualities it does undo the vegetarianism somewhat; it’s fairly pointless choking down hemp, tofu and glossop if I’m flossing my teeth with a lemur’s hamstring. I think on the whole I’d rather use plastic than animal parts.

That brings us to the Preserve toothbrush made from recycled yogurt pots. Although its bristles are made from new plastic, the whole thing can be recycled after use which means there’s almost no waste. They’re made in America so getting them here and back must take a hefty chunk of carbon, but its manufacturer buys carbon credits as a get-out-of-Gore card. It’s not ideal but it’s a contender.

Then we have the Monte Bianco toothbrush with replaceable heads. It would mean I could use the handle for the rest of my life and buy just a few heads a year, reducing my toothbrush waste by about 80%. That’s quite impressive but they’re made from first use plastic and the heads aren’t recyclable, and sending anything to landfill these days feels about as good as punching a seal pup in the tits. This is a good idea not quite there yet.

Right. Enough deliberating. A decision is needed; I’ve been writing this entry for sixteen hours now. I’m going to go for the yogurt pots. None of the options are perfect and none will improve my sleep significantly or stop me flagellating myself with the Stick of Shame but it’s about the most forward-thinking toothbrush out there. If it gets itself a factory in the UK it’ll be damn near perfect.

The problem is that the more charities we choose, the fewer remain for the future. We have, with our donations from last year, already solved the problems of the developing world, water poverty, human rights abuses, environmental outrages, flooding and under-education, supported veterans from the World Wars and converted the world to vegetarianism. We’re running out of issues. We are dangerously close to picking Burt Ward’s Great Dane sanctuary.

Fortunately the large corporations of the world are still doing great evil, so this month we’re going for Baby Milk Action. I’ve spent the past few days knee deep in the Nestlé boycott section of the site and Baby Milk Action have been a useful source. By which I mean I nicked most of it from them. They’re a small organisation taking on huge corporations that aggressively market breast milk substitute in countries where its use, when mixed with lousy water, can kill. It’s full on David and Goliath stuff.

As a campaigning organisation they’re not able to register with the Charity Commission so we can’t check up on how they spend our money but God knows they’re not frittering it away on web design. Let’s take the risk and donate here, helping them highlight the arsehole things these companies are doing to make a few quid.

In the meantime, somebody start a war or something. Much as I like animals I really don’t want to give next month’s money to a bunch of Robin’s dogs.

And so to new year resolutions, a pointless exercise given my current greatness but one I dabble in for the sake of my inferiors and their fully justified inferiority complexes. The challenge here is to find some tiny improvement I can make somewhere. After all, even history’s great humans have had to tweak the odd thing here and there. Rumour has it every January Ghandi would make a fresh effort to cut down on crack. Of course, that was in the days before crack patches and crack gum so only the hardest of hearts would condemn his faltering willpower.

My first resolution is full on proper resolution cliché. I’ve agreed to do a 10K for charity so I need to get out and do some exercise. Thanks to half a life of crap health and wonky legs I’ve only recently mastered the art of walking, so running will be quite a stretch. In fact 10K is about 9.8 more K than the total K I’ve run to date. Weights, physio, protein shakes and barely-used gym memberships await. It’ll be six months of solid work to raise an estimated £14 from the three people I’m actually friends with.

My second resolution is to find the world’s most ethical toothbrush, my current model having harmed mankind for quite long enough. More on that later. My third resolution is to launch Operation Parmesan, an until-now classified plan for a major assault on the world of rennet and rennet consumption. More on that also later, after the earlier later mentioned above. Finally, I’ll stop telling lies about the likes of Ghandi. It’s a cheap trick, elevating my own status by criticising the great men and women who came before me. It’s the kind of vindictive shit Nelson Mandela would pull, the low down dirty schemer. Rumour has it he was behind the whispering campaigns that alleged Winston Churchill was the illegitimate grandson of Professor Moriarty and Mother Theresa sexually harassed vulnerable otters. Of course, both rumours were actually true but he didn’t know that at the time. What a shower of bastards.